BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — In a town where seemingly everyone wishes for stardom but few hopefuls look like James Franco or Scarlett Johansson, talent agent Sid Levin stands up for the people who look like the rest of us.

“I am kind of the strange guy here in Hollywood,” Levin said. “I rep a lot of talented people but people who are kind of the underdog. But that’s OK. I’m the underdog, too.”

Among his breakthrough underdogs is former juvenile-hall guard Dot-Marie Jones.

She was nominated for three consecutive Emmys after landing the role of Coach Beiste on Glee.

On Levin’s desk is a Rolodex with a list of more than 100 actors, many of them unfamiliar to most people.

Abdoulaye NGom, for example, is a Senegalese-born actor who came to Los Angeles 35 years ago with the unlikely dream of becoming a star.

“But Sid said: ‘There’s just something about you. I know you’re going to work,’ ” recalled the actor, who, after years of small parts in films such as George of the Jungle, recently played the kindly hotel manager in the Drew Barrymore-Adam Sandler comedy Blended.

Likewise, when Levin saw the square-jawed, no-nonsense-looking Coast Guard Petty Officer Mike Dalager, he said, he knew just what roles to send him after. Dalager has been a cop, a soldier and a member of the Enterprise crew in Star Trek: Into Darkness. He was also a Taliban militiaman in Eagle Eye.

“It’s definitely a what-you-look-like industry,” said Dalager, adding that Levin seems to know that better than anyone.

Levin, 56, looks as if he could have walked out of a movie about an old-time agent in the mold of Broadway Danny Rose. He is short, paunchy and typically dressed in slacks and a blue pullover shirt with a gold medallion around his neck.

Thirty years ago, the former stand-up comic and singing-telegram salesman put up a shingle in a tiny office at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

“People told me I had to move because nobody would go there after dark,” he recalled of Hollywood’s rougher days.

Kids from the even-rougher streets of South Los Angeles would, however, especially after Levin got seven of them roles in director John Singleton’s breakthrough movie Boyz N the Hood in 1991. They had been sent to him by acting coach Anthony Bean, who was trying to get them away from street gangs.

“Don’t ask me why and how I found Sid. I don’t even recall,” said Bean, who has since returned to his native New Orleans to run an acting school for inner-city youth.

The next break came when a tough-looking Latino actor from one of Los Angeles’ roughest barrios came through the door. When Danny Trejo started to work regularly, Levin recalls, he volunteered at prisoner workshops and began sending his students to him.

“Ex-cons who were bank robbers and what have you started showing up, and that was kind of dicey,” Levin recalled.

As most of the kids from the city’s mean streets drifted away from acting, and some like Trejo who became big stars moved on to other, more prominent representation, Levin began to focus more on military and law-enforcement people.

He thought they have as much right to dream of being stars as anybody else.